Back in mid-June, Leslie Gelb floated an idea in an op-ed piece that he published in The Wall Street Journal. After the midterms, he argued, when Robert Gates resigned his position as Secretary of Defense, Hillary Clinton should be given the job in preparation for making her the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2012. As a booby prize – Gelb spoke, of course, in more flattering terms – Joe Biden could be made Secretary of State.

Apart from fact that it requires one to suppose that a man known as “loose lips,” notorious for blurting out the first thing that comes into his mind, would make a decent Secretary of State, Gelb’s suggestion made a certain amount of sense. President Obama was no longer popular; Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill had a considerable following that would be far more likely to come to the polls in 2012 if she were on the ticket; and it had long been obvious that Barack Obama held his Vice-President in contempt.

With these facts in mind, in a post back in July, I noted the criticism leveled at President Obama by erstwhile supporters of Hillary Clinton such as Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and James Carville. And I then raised the possibility that President Obama might seize upon the occasion of Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to catch her father at a time when, as everyone knows, a man from Arkansas can deny no one a favor and that he might then close the deal suggested by Gelb and get the husband of his Secretary of State to call off the attack dogs unleashed by the Clinton family.

Soon thereafter, however, I learned that Chelsea and her intended – the son of a former Congressman convicted on 31 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud and known to law enforcement agencies as Fast-Talkin’ Eddie – had chosen not to invite the current President of the United States to their wedding. In an update to my post noting this ominous fact, I speculated that this might mean that Slick Willie, Fast-Talkin’ Eddie, and the Ragin’ Cajun were planning to go to the mattresses.

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Something ominous is happening within the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama will soon have to start paying attention. For weeks now, James Carville has been railing against the Obama administration’s handling of the oil spill in the Gulf. On Tuesday, Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, added further fuel to the flames by issuing a warning. If Obama did not start pulling troops out of Afghanistan in July, 2011 as promised, he predicted that there would be a political insurrection within the party and that the President might face a primary challenge. It is in no way surprising that the Republicans have revived Hillary Clinton’s famous “3 a.m.” political advertisement and have given it a new spin, for they smell blood in the water. “Hillary was right,” they say. After the oil spill, the proverbial telephone rang and rang and rang, and the President . . . golfed, partied with celebrities, and went on vacation again and again.

Carville and Rendell have this in common. They are Democrats; they are fiercely partisan; and they were strong supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries back in 2008. Their maneuvers should perhaps be read in light of an op-ed piece that Leslie Gelb published in The Wall Street Journal back in the middle of June, suggesting that, when Robert Gates retires, Hillary be made the first female Secretary of Defense; that, in 2012, she be put on the ticket in place of Joe Biden; and that Biden be awarded the booby prize and be named Secretary of State.

I have no idea whether Gelb ran his piece past the Clintons before publishing it. But I would not be surprised. He, too, is a restless, frustrated, critical Democrat on the outs, and the scenario that he paints is by no means ridiculous. Joe Biden is not an asset, and Barack Obama views him with obvious disdain. Bill Clinton is a talented campaigner and a master in the art of staging comebacks, and in 2012 Hillary might be able to turn out a host of white women to vote for Obama who would otherwise sit on their hands.

As it happens, on Saturday, President Obama will have a priceless opportunity that he would be ill-advised to pass up. On that fateful day, in Rhinebeck, New York, on the estate of John Jacob Astor IV, if the rumors are borne out, Chelsea Clinton will marry Marc Mezvinsky in the presence of 400 of their parents’ best friends. And, although Bill Clinton is not a Sicilian, he would certainly be hard-pressed on so auspicious a day to deny anyone who asked of him a favor – least of all a sitting President of the United States who came to him, saying, May their first child be a masculine child!

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